Ode to a Jellyfish
by electric caterpillar
Summary: !rated m for disturbing and sexual content. A secret of the Hyoudou progeny.


But while I float with your drifts'n hovers,  
We're giv'n no chance to tread as lovers,  
Eons have left us no sense we share,  
No kiss, no caress, no word, no stare.  
Oh, to've met you on earlier sand,  
'Fore mammals betrayed water for land,  
Epochs where such a love might carry,  
Embraced in lost time's station'ry tarry...

No such strand, alas, hath destiny,  
To rend me from Land and you from Sea.  
Still, I'll build castles of sand, and more,  
Kingdoms for you! I wait on the shore.

* * *

You step into the terminal and see Kazuya, holding out a bouquet of red roses and smiling. His smile is his father's smile, something which can be horrible to see, but now it is soft and sure and earnest.

At seventeen, he is a head taller than you. He hugs you and lifts your feet off the floor.

"Welcome home," he says, and bows his head so you can kiss his cheeks.

Your guard as usual shadows you, heavily burdened by your portable wardrobe. The walk out of the private hangar to the car is modest, but Kazuya, with his hand in your purse to seek out the candies you habitually carry, dotes on you as if you were descending a mountain.

"How was your trip?" Kazuya asks, and you assure him it was fine. Impulsively, he puts his arm around your shoulder as you walk. You find it funny that he can commit with such candor an imposition for which almost any other person on earth would be shot dead on the spot.

The chauffeur does not speak to you. He opens your door bent deeply at the waist as if ashamed to disturb you with the necessity of his presence.

Ignoring the abundance of seats offered by the spacious interior, Kazuya sits beside you. He appears unable to stop talking. He wants to know everything you did, where you stayed, what food you ate, what you bought — especially what you bought.

You describe the gowns, the necklaces, the swan-shaped shoes, the repulsive ruby-encrusted crown you are certain you will never so much as look at again, and procure from your purse the beribboned wrapped package which contains a gold tiepin with a minuscule elephant rearing at the tip.

Kazuya exalts it so hotly you know he does not like it at all, but in his act of gratitude he kisses your face all over with an exaggerated fervor that makes you laugh and musses your hair, and you forgive his transparency instantly. He smooths your disturbed curls with the flats of his hands, weaves them back into the knot on your head, and lays his cheek on your shoulder

Kazuya can be very exasperating. You sigh, but you are smiling.

You feel a sticky, sour malaise from your plane ride, despite the luxuries it was padded in. Your legs and feet are cramped and sore.

Kazuya has nodded off.

You recall that even as an infant, the android drone of engine would lull him immediately to sleep.

When he woke in the early morning and could not be calmed, biting your breast and striking the nurse in her face, you would insist on riding with him in the soft dark of the town car, in your gauzy nightgown, almost dozing, watching him quiet and calm, putting your finger the plump centers of his tiny perfect palms upon which they closed like a venus fly trap, as the city lights passed away in mute electric streaks outside your moving cocoon.

Tenderly, you touch his cheek, the loose locks of awful orange hair, and he murmurs to you in his dream nothing you divided from him by the waking world can understand.

He looks like nothing but his father. Your life is saturated in his father.

Sometimes, only for flashes of an instant, you almost feel as if you could hate your child, your special boy that loves you so devotedly, and it makes you sick.

As if summoned, Kazuya starts awake, looks about, alights on you, and smiles slowly, sweetly, his father's smile which can be so cruel.

"Are we there?" he asks.

Very nearly, you tell him, and pat his knee, and he weaves his fingers in yours and examines in his the architecture of your hands, the web beneath your knuckles, the plush of your palm, the diamonds that dress them, a babyish fidget you wonder if he will ever quit.

The sober black iron gate is drawn apart for you like a curtain, and the car climbs the boulevard, idles at the maw of the manse.

Kazuya helps you from the car, holds your hand still tightly in his like a very small child as he escorts you up the broad ostentatious stair.

You look around your shoulder and see the specters of men in black suits and sunglasses at the foot of the stair, some unloading, some merely waiting, watching you with practiced indiscernible expressions worn over their horror, and it occurs to you not for the first time that though you will turn thirty years old in the next few years, you could be Kazuya's schoolyard amore.

"Dad is in the library," Kazuya says, trotting after you in the vast hall like a duckling, and you don't have the heart to tell him his father will want to see you alone.

The chairman is sitting beyond the grocery of books in a deep red velvet chair by the tall window, some gory pornographic tome open in his lap, and bars of light in which dust motes swim like plankton fall over his loose pallid hair and sloping shoulders. He looks almost gentle.

"Hello, my dear," says the chairman, and you stoop obediently at his side to receive his kisses. "Welcome home. We've missed you."

"Mom bought me a new pin."

"That's fine. That's fine. Kazuya, why don't you go see what we'll have for dinner?

Kazuya frowns. His hand, which still contains yours, tightens petulantly.

"Go on. Choose something nice for your mother."

You nod at your child with a pleasant smile, but your eyes you narrow almost imperceptibly. Kazuya obeys you.

"I want hamburgers," he says.

The heavy wooden double doors are closed by silent men in black suits, departing after Kazuya, with an air of profound finality.

The chairman is very old, but not so old he can no longer pull you on his knee, arrange your arms like a doll's on his shoulders, pose you as he pleases, not so old that the soft lump on your hip remains soft as the chairman unzips your dress, exposes your front to the cool of the room, opens your thighs and slides his fine palm up and over the top of your stockings.

"I missed you," says the chairman, squeezing your arms, putting his nose in your throat and inhaling deeply. "Did you miss me?"

You assure him that you have. In the branch of a skeletal tree growing outside the window a raven roosts, watching you. You think that the amazing deep black of its feathers is very beautiful.

The chairman has pushed the hem of your skirt over your bottom and he strikes it, startling you. He pinches your chin in his thumb and forefinger, turns your face to him and kisses your mouth. His mouth is tepid and sour.

"You're so pretty," the chairman croons, and pulls the band from your hair so it bursts and tumbles out about you, intertwines with the chairman's, touching your breast with stripes of stark black and white. He closes his claw on it, clutches it like a ripe apple.

"So pretty," he praises, arranging you on his parts and releasing a deeply satisfied sigh into the hollow of your collar, "My pretty girl. You look so much like your mother."

Kazuya gets his hamburgers for dinner. He tucks in with his father.

You cut yours in half and let it lay oozing on the plate like a vivisected frog.

The chef, distressed, offers you salad, brisket, desserts, any delicacy you can name, but you decline. You can't recall feeling less hungry in your life.

The chairman has a wing reserved for himself, and a wing reserved for Kazuya, in fact, but Kazuya has stubbornly resided in the room just adjacent to yours ever since his father put his foot down that he must sleep alone.

"I'm happy you're home," Kazuya confesses, sitting in his ugly green pajamas cross-legged on your bed with a cellophane sack of some saccharine snack in his lap, watching you comb out your hair.

You don't reply.

It is the witching hour, the time between the old and new, and you are looking up in the sweet-smelling dark at the belly of the gauzy pink canopy you chose for yourself as a little girl, and thinking that Kazuya's hair is really awful, you must find a way to convince him to cut it, and your legs are still a little sore, you would have a good swim in the morning, if Kazuya would stop splashing you and trying to dunk you long enough for you to swim a lap, and that crown was really hideous, what were you thinking? and you were very tired, very, very, very tired, but you didn't know if you'd be able to sleep tonight.

That raven, you feel like a thorn in your stomach, is outside your window, hidden from you in the moonless night, but he sees you, can always see you.

You are pregnant.

You haven't prayed in a very, very long time, not since before Kazuya was born, but you pray now.

You pray the baby in you is a boy.


End file.
